This is one thing the Japanese banking system actually handles pretty well. When you send money, you enter the bank name, branch and account number and it will give you the reading of the name on the account (Japanese names/words can be read in many ways). If you keep trying this on different accounts your bank will disable this functionality and require you to enter the reading on the account to send money to it, until you go into a branch to reset it.

There is definitely similar Japanese-specific issues with specifying readings (especially for foreign names), but this works far better than requiring someone to specify the name exactly on the account to see if it is a match or not. I'm not sure if that would work well in the UK given how much more larger the Faster Payments infrastructure is.